Texas’ most dangerous border leads to New Mexico

Texas’ most dangerous border leads to New Mexico

CARLSBAD, N.M. — Texas’ most dangerous and unchecked border doesn’t lie to the south along the Rio Grande, but rather to the west, where the Permian Basin oil boom is expanding along narrow and deadly roads into rural New Mexico, driving breakneck growth with little oversight and not nearly enough highways, housing, health care and environmental air monitoring.

The Midland-Odessa area in West Texas remains the hub for the prolific oil field with about 350,000 people and some of the fastest economic growth in the country, but even greater change is occurring 150 miles away in this boomtown, where the population has nearly doubled to 75,000 people from 40,000 just a few years ago. Even as lackluster oil prices slow drilling and lower rig counts in Texas by 20 percent over the past year, New Mexico drillers have never been busier, increasing the number of operating rigs in the state by nearly 15 percent to 113.

Outside Carlsbad, worker camps and RV parks surround the overcrowded city. Tourists to the famous Carlsbad Caverns must find lodging many miles away because the Carlsbad hotels are filled with oil workers. Nearly 200 children, most staying in temporary worker housing with single parents, commute each day from the so-called man camps to Carlsbad schools.

The epicenter of this evolving boom is the Permian’s western lobe, known as the Delaware Basin, which stretches from Pecos, Texas to Carlsbad. The cities are connected by U.S. 285, a stretch of mostly two-lane road that has become known in recent years as the “Death Highway” and spurred a new way to wish travelers well: “Stay alive on 285.”

Joe Gomez, a truck driver from El Paso for the Canadian oil field services company Calfrac, often finds himself praying during his trips through the heavily trafficked Permian corridor that connects the two states. He’s witnessed countless accidents and had several near misses, no matter how defensively he drives.

“It’s very dangerous out here, and it’s just getting worse and worse with the growth,” Gomez said. “A lot of people are getting killed when they’re not getting enough sleep and just trying to drive back home.”

About 450 traffic fatalities occur each year in the Permian Basin region of Texas and New Mexico, according to state and county statistics. Along the entire U.S.-Mexico border, the federal government estimated about 300 migrant deaths a year related to border crossings.

John Waters, Carlsbad’s executive director of economic development, admits the rapid growth has strained the region’s capacity to accommodate it. The roads have become more dangerous, scary even, and housing is in short supply and far from getting built fast enough to keep up with the influx of people.

"Getting the housing here, that is the only thing keeping us from exploding into a Midland-sized community," said John Waters, executive director of the Carlsbad Department of Development. "We thank God for all of the natural resources we sit in."

(Jon Shapley/Staff Photographer | Houston Chronicle)

But the region — and New Mexico — are prospering, Waters said. The oil boom is generating billions of dollars in state revenues, thousands of jobs and a flood of new office, retail and residential construction.

“I would rather be fighting the problems of climbing up a mountain than falling off the other side,” Waters said. “We see ourselves as a young Midland. We’re not afraid of growth. We’re a lot like Texas.”

But not everyone sees it that way.

The Rev. Dave Rogers of First Christian Church is part of a group of concerned New Mexico citizens speaking out against the too-fast-for-its-own-good growth and the increased pollution that has come with it. The region, he said, is sending more than $2.2 billion a year in oil and gas revenues to state government — one-third of the total state budget — but isn’t getting much in return, except broken roads and dirty air.

Rogers said he’s tired of officiating funerals for people killed on the highways.

“There’s this feeling that we’re in this sacrifice zone,” Rogers said. “I want to put gas in my car, but I don’t want to have to lose my life for the privilege.”

Drilling rigs light New Mexico’s night sky, giving the arid desert the appearance of a city center in the distance. Flares, burning off natural gas, add to the glow.

Pipeline shortages, high transportation costs and low commodity prices have made natural gas, a byproduct of oil drilling, disposable. Many companies burn natural gas away or simply vent it into the air rather than risk losing money on it. But methane — the primary component of natural gas — is a potent greenhouse gas responsible for about one-quarter of the world’s global warming, according to the National Academy of Sciences.

Permian methane emissions likely hit a new record in the second quarter of the year, the Norwegian research firm Rystad Energy estimates. The volumes of methane burned off or vented into the atmosphere tripled from two years ago, according to Rystad.

The Permian has just three air-quality monitoring stations in Texas and two in New Mexico, compared to more than 60 in Greater Houston, according to the Environmental Integrity Project, an advocacy group in Austin. Sharon Wilson, senior organizer for another advocacy group, Earthworks, has for two years used infrared cameras to document emissions, not visible to the naked eye, that come from flares, storage tanks and leaky pipelines associated with oil and gas drilling.

“It’s happening all over,” Wilson said. “If it were visible, then the people would revolt, because it’s everywhere.”

In New Mexico, the state has only begun to develop emissions and flaring rules after Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham created a methane advisory panel this summer during her first year in office. Methane accounts for one-third of New Mexico’s greenhouse gas emissions compared to one-tenth nationwide.

But the state also has a $2 billion budget surplus created almost entirely by oil and gas revenues. New Mexico is proposing free college tuition for all New Mexico residents as it counts on more oil money for many years to come.

"I think we're going to step it up in Texas, because Texas is going to kill everybody," said Sharon Wilson as she checks for gas emissions at drilling sites using an infrared camera near Pecos. "At the least, they could do a lot better," she said. Wilson is an environmental organizer with Earthworks, and she said she tries to go to the Permian at least once per month.

(Jon Shapley/Staff Photographer | Houston Chronicle)

Duct tape covers parts of an oil and gas structure near Pecos.

(Jon Shapley/Staff Photographer | Houston Chronicle)

Here to stay?

Operating mostly in New Mexico, Ken Waits, president of Tyler-based Mewbourne Oil, said his company only drills and completes wells once all the oil and gas pipeline hookups are in place.

“We’re incentivized to sell natural gas. We don’t want to flare gas,” Waits said. “We want to be good stewards of the environment.”

Mewbourne has quietly grown into the largest private oil and gas producer in the Permian in recent years, with only Exxon Mobil operating significantly more drilling rigs in New Mexico.Mewbourne recently opened a regional office in Hobbs, N.M., another hub of oil and gas activity about 70 miles east of Carlsbad.

Founded in 1965 by Curtis Mewbourne, who remains the owner today, the company first started drilling in southeastern New Mexico in 1970. But Mewbourne largely focused on natural gas until the shale revolution unlocked crude oil in New Mexico. In 2010, Mewbourne produced only 2,000 barrels of oil per day. Now, it’s up to 100,000 barrels daily.

Holding up a hand to shield his eyes from the blistering sun at a drilling rig site south of Carlsbad, Waits used his free hand to pet a dog, Buddy, that’s followed the rig crew from well to well for nearly a year, fed a steady diet of steak and chicken. “Only the best rigs have a dog,” Waits jokes.

Waits has seen the ups and downs over the decades as activity levels followed oil and gas prices and the occasional new discovery. But now New Mexico is busier than ever with oil prices stuck in the $50-something-per-barrel range as companies, particularly the majors such as Exxon Mobil and Chevron driving the growth, find ways to produce oil at lower costs and make money at lower prices.

Given the oil sector’s long history, he’s hesitant to say this boom is different from past cycles. But it is different, he said.

“What I’ve tried to help people understand is this is an industry that has a well-deserved reputation of booms and busts and volatility. But this is not a normal boom,” Waits said. “This activity in the Permian and in New Mexico is not driven by high oil and gas prices. It’s driven by innovation, technology, great people and world-class geology.”

A storage pond near Anadarko Wolf Camp Lodge, near Mentone, Texas.

A storage pond near Anadarko Wolf Camp Lodge, near Mentone, Texas.

Photo: Jon Shapley/Staff Photographer

Photo: Jon Shapley/Staff Photographer

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A storage pond near Anadarko Wolf Camp Lodge, near Mentone, Texas.

A storage pond near Anadarko Wolf Camp Lodge, near Mentone, Texas.

Photo: Jon Shapley/Staff Photographer

Texas’ most dangerous border leads to New Mexico

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Housing crunch

Long-term success here, however, may depend on whether the region can develop enough housing. The lack of adequate housing not only makes it difficult to recruit oil field workers but also teachers, doctors, police and people in other occupations that support a community, said Tracee Bentley, chief executive of the Permian Partnership, a coalition of Permian oil companies working to address problems the boom has created.

In many cases, said Waters, the Carlsbad development director, apartment rents have risen from about $800 per month to almost $2,000. Most apartment complexes have waiting lists of about 200 people. In his neighborhood, one home is rented out to 12 out-of-town oil workers.

“We have instances of folks who are homeless all of a sudden,” Waters said. “They have to pay double to stay in the same place. We’ve seen a lot of that. But it’s free enterprise, and we know that eventually we’ll grow out of it.”

The influx of oil workers has sent school enrollments soaring from 6,400 students in 2017 toabout 7,200 this fall, with the expectation of hitting 8,000 as soon as next year. As a result, Carlsbad needs more teachers, but Gerry Washburn, the Carlsbad school superintendent, said it’s difficult to hire teachers when they can’t find places to live.

The school system is about to build an array of manufactured homes for about $180,000 each to rent to teachers. Just don’t call them “teacher camps.”

“It’s not like the man camps,” Washburn said. “These are two, three-bedroom homes. But there’s going to be a bunch of them in a row.”

For Target Hospitality, a company from The Woodlands that builds worker housing in the oil patch, “camps” is a dirty word. Target prefers “lodges.” Workers in its housing typically get private rooms and showers and all of their meals served on the premises. The complexes also feature basketball courts, recreation centers and other amenities.

Target, which operates 22 lodges in the Permian, opened three in the Delaware Basin this summer, one near Carlsbad and two in Texas along U.S. 285.

"I've been sleeping in the parking lot and waiting for a room," said Larry Reyna at the Pecos South Lodge.

(Jon Shapley/Staff Photographer | Houston Chronicle)

Noisy neighbors

Just outside of the Carlsbad city limits, past a pecan tree farm, a once-agricultural area has become dominated by oil and gas drilling.

Dee George and his wife, Penny Aucoin, look across the street from their home at wells being drilled and fracked. State law requires the wellhead to be 300 feet from their property; the closest wells apparently just make the cut.

But that setback doesn’t keep gas fumes from wafting into their home, or noise of 24-hour-a-day drilling operations from keeping them up at night, or oil workers from driving more than double the 30 miles per hour speed limit on the country road passing their home. Two of their cars have been totaled in the last few years, including Aucoin getting rear-ended by an oil company truck.

“Every time you hear an ambulance,” Aucoin said, “you wonder, ‘Is it one of the ones I love?’”

They blame pollution from the drilling operations for their 17-year-old son’s regular nosebleeds. They fear letting their 10-year-old daughter play outside.

“What am I supposed to do? I can’t sell it. Do I just abandon everything and move?” George said. “I was hoping it would just boom and bust and go away.”

Oil workers continue to flock to the area. Kyle Smith, from Houston, counts himself lucky. A regional supply chain manager for Marathon Oil, he moved his wife and two daughters to Carlsbad sight unseen in January, staying in a hotel and corporate apartment before buying a home — and admittedly overpaying for it — in March.

But it’s worked out. They’re happy with the schools, and they’ve made a friends, many of them fellow Texans. “I joke all time my wife must really love me to move out here,” he said.

Not everyone relocates. Larry Reyna, a Halliburton oil field worker with five children, travels about 10 hours each way, twice a month, from his home in Sallisaw, Okla., staying in worker camps.

As with many oil workers, he said the grueling travel and separation from his family is worth it because the pay and benefits are better than jobs he can find closer to home.

“I can’t complain too much,” Reyna said. “With life in the oil field, once you get used to it, you’re in it to win it.”

Daryl Sheppard, a Schlumberger fracking crew worker, drives eight hours from Garland, Texas, to Carlsbad. He sweats in the 100-degree heat in his work gear after a 5 a.m.-to-5 p.m. shift.

The area is booming, he says, and there’s plenty of work and plenty of money to be made. Then, he pauses.

“It’s not for everybody. You have to be really dedicated,” Sheppard said. “I’m kind of burnt out.”

"Is there a time to call it? A time to say, 'They won,' and we just leave?" asked Dee George in Carlsbad, as a well was being drilled directly across the street from his home. George is a special education teacher in Carlsbad, and he said his family has owned the land his trailer sits on since he was 9 years old. He described birds dying in his yard after flying over another nearby well, and he said he has smelled gas in his house multiple times.

Jordan Blum is a senior energy reporter at the Houston Chronicle since 2015. He has extensively covered the industry from the 2014 bust in oil prices to the more recent boom in West Texas’ Permian Basin. He has written about everything from Texas’ national lead in renewable wind power to the Houston area’s growing dominance in petrochemical and plastics manufacturing. Previously, Jordan was an award-winning reporter at The Advocate in Baton Rouge and New Orleans as a statehouse reporter and education writer, and then as the newspaper’s Washington Bureau chief. Jordan is a New Orleans native who graduated from Texas Christian University with a journalism degree before going back to work at daily newspapers in Louisiana. Follow him on Twitter @JDBlum23. Reach him by email at jordan.blum@chron.com.

Jon Shapley is a staff photojournalist for the Houston Chronicle, and he's interested in meeting people and telling stories. A native Houstonian, he joined the Chronicle in 2015. He previously worked at the NPR affiliate in Austin, as well as monthly magazines in Austin and San Antonio. Reach him by email at jon.shapley@chron.com.